Frito Lay fights back

Frito Lay Canada is fighting back against misinformation that has been spreading about its SunChips compostable bag.

After the U.S. arm of the company pulled some of the bags from production because customers were complaining the new compostable material was louder than traditional bags, the brand took some bad press, including a lengthy segment that mocked the company on the satirical news show The Colbert Report.

Frito Lay Canada had been painted with the same brush and felt it had to respond, Tony Matta, VP, marketing, Frito Lay Canada, tells MiC.

‘First and foremost, we wanted to get the right facts out there, and then based on having the right facts out there, we wanted to encourage some conversation around those facts,’ Matta says.

The company bought space in the Globe and Mail, Calgary Herald, Toronto Star, Winnipeg Free Press and Vancouver Sun so they could run a full-page ‘letter to the nation’ stating that the compostable bags would continue to be used in Canada, despite complaints about their noisiness.

The media buy was handled by OMD’s Toronto office, and creative was by Capital C Communications and Fleishman-Hillard, also in Toronto.

Frito Lay also produced a video PSA featuring Helmi Ansari, the company’s sustainability leader, and, in French, Anne-Marie Renaud, VP, operations. Both speak to viewers about the compostable bags, and the video will appear on the websites of the CBC, Toronto Star, Calgary Sun, La Presse and the Canadian versions of ABC and NBC.

It has also been sent to environmental bloggers and posted on the company’s Facebook page.

‘The first step was setting the record straight and getting the facts out there,’ says Matta. ‘The second step is enabling the conversation.’